POST-COLD WAR

2000s

General

Le - N

The former Secretary of the Navy and 9/11 commission member does not really answer the question raised in the title. Other than that, however, this article is a powerful indictment of how Congress and the White House mishandled the intelligence reform effort. His most pointed criticisms are directed at the FBI ("Our attempt to reform the FBI has failed.") and the failure to create a strong DNI.

Leslau, Ohad. "Intelligence and Economics: Two Disciplines with a Common Dilemma." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 20, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 106-121.

The dilemma faced by both professional intelligence and economic advisors in their work for the government is: "should they be loyal to their employers -- the highest echelon of decisionmakers -- or to their professional ethics?" The author suggests that "[t]he CIA and other governmental organizations that function as professional advisory bodies should adopt" the practices of the Council of Economic Advisors and appoint "outside professionals who are not from the political arena."

Daniel, Proceedings 139.3 (Mar. 2013), notes that in this work the former commanding officer of the USS Cole "repeatedly states that the events surrounding the Cole attack represented a series of systemic errors at every level of the defense and intelligence communities..... Ultimately, the author concludes that the biggest tragedy of the Cole incident was that it did not serve as a catalyst for decisive action against al Qaeda."

In July 2003, DARPA "backed off a plan to set up a kind of futures market, a Policy Analysis Market (PAM), that would allow investors to earn profits by betting on the likelihood of such events as regime changes in the Middle East.... The project was canceled a day after it was announced." Although "DARPA may have put too much faith in a theory that is being increasingly questioned in the economics profession," the idea "did break new ground in Washington's search for better intelligence." The author suggests that "some version of the program will likely be introduced on a restricted basis."

In a stringent commentary, the author argues that U.S. intelligence "has failed ... not because of 9/11, or Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.... We have failed because we have not explained ourselves adequately and comprehensibly to the public -- describing our role, the limits within which we work and our view of what can be reasonably expected from us. We have failed because we have allowed ourselves to be caricatured, vilified and misrepresented by people who do not know us, do not like us and do not understand us -- or simply see us as convenient fall guys.... [T]he net result has been a misguided restructuring of the entire intelligence community based on faulty premises."

Maddrell, Paul. "Failing Intelligence: U.S. Intelligence in the Age of Transnational Threats." International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 22, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 195-220.

"The outstanding challenge of the new era for the Intelligence Community is that its two main tasks involve an intensive global search for targets that are very easy to hide: conspiracies of people, and weapons research and development projects.... The task of couterterrorism intelligence collection is not merely very difficult: it must be conducted throughout the world in combination with allies whose interests are often considerably different from those of the United States."

From "Executive Summary": "[W]e remain vulnerable to terrorist attack and emerging national security threats because we have not adequately improved our ability to know what we know about these threats.... To improve decision making, the new administration needs to take immediate steps to improve information sharing.... At the same time, civil liberties are at risk because we don't have the government-wide policies in place to protect them as intelligence collection has expanded."

Siobhan Gorman, "Group Finds Intelligence Gap Persists," Wall Street Journal, 10 Mar. 2009, quotes outgoing DNI Mike McConnell as saying that "the group's advice is similar to what he told his successor, Dennis Blair. 'It was my recommendation that he make [intelligence sharing] one of his top priorities,' said Mr. McConnell, who praised the task force's efforts to focus attention on the issue."

From abstract: "[T]he 9/11 Commission Report identifies as a significant failure the lack of [an NIE] on the terrorist threat between 1998 and 2001, and implies that if one had been produced it might have helped" decision-makers "prevent the 9/11 attacks.... This article takes a closer look at the case of the missing [NIE] by first evaluating what decision-makers knew about the threat prior to the 9/11 attacks, the policies they were implementing at the time, and the extent to which the hypothetical" NIE "would have mattered in terms of influencing their judgement and policy.... It concludes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were more a failure of policy than strategic intelligence analysis."

See Geoffrey D. Dabelko, ed., "The U.S. National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2015: Excerpts, Commentaries, and Response," Environmental Change & Security Project Report 7 (Summer 2001): 59-99. There are 14 brief responses to the NIC's report included here, as well as a response by Ellen Laipson, acting chair of the NIC.

"Mapping the Global Future is the third unclassified report prepared by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in the past seven years [Global Trends 2010 and Global Trends 2015] that takes a long-term view of the future.... [T]he project's primary goal is to provide US policymakers with a view of how the world developments could evolve, identifying opportunities and potentially negative developments that might warrant policy action." Intelligencer 14.2 (Winter-Spring 2005), carries the "Executive Summary: The 2020 Global Landscape" of this report.

Goldgeier, NWCR 57.3/4 (Summer-Autumn 2004), notes that Nichols believes that the Cold War contest offers lessons for U.S. strategists as they faces the new enemy responsible for 9/11. The author "stresses that the key feature of the U.S.-Soviet struggle was the difference in ideology and that in a new war with new ideological foes, the United States can learn from the recent past." However, "he spends so much time expressing his rage at those who did not understand Soviet evil that he misses how much the new materials enable us to explore ... in even greater detail" the very issues he raises.

With no pun intended, this is a well done "think piece." One thought among many: "The better integration of open source information and expertise..., information sharing, and a fundamental review of security practices represent an iron triangle of intelligence reform and reconceptualization."